Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived

A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?

Update: seemingly not

Update: Oh yeah!

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

More more more, for me me me

As you can see below, comments on this weblog are "currently unavailable". I have no idea why this might be so, or what reason there might be why the strange Internet benefactors who make the comments possible might have had problems with their "servers" or whatnot, but I am almightily pissed off. Bastards! How dare they provide such a shoddy service! I want to look at my comments now NOW NOW! For Christ's sake! I am the Internet Age consumer. I want things Free, Perfect and Now. Anyone failing to provide me with the five-nines reliability and ease of use that I expect (nay demand), runs the risk of losing forever the five nanoseconds of my attention which I deign to pass their way, missing forever the chance to show me a small banner ad, which I will also complain about.

In retrospect, it's sort of easy to see why those 1999 stock valuations weren't sustainable.

update : They're still not working. Here's a short explanation of why I'm so angry:

This is clearly a violation of my rights. One might make an analogy between my creation of D-squared Digest and the development and settlement of the United States of America. I came along, and found a "virgin territory" (the servers of blogspot and netcomments.co.uk). There were some other people who might have been regarded as having a claim to them, but they weren't using them in any meaningful sense; they weren't adding any value to them and many might have seen their ownership as wasteful. I came along, and mixed my labour with the territory of the blogspot servers, thus creating a property right for myself under natural law. Now those bastards at netcomments are despoiling my territory by not running the comments thing properly, while those thieves at blogspot are polluting my land claim by putting that banner ad at the top of the page (which I don't personally care about, but it's de rigeur to complain about such things). I would, as far as I can see, be quite within my rights to retaliate with massive force in defence of this, my little "homestead" on the vast wasteland of the Internet.

update: Still not working! damn to hell and back. In the meantime, I have a theory of why it's impossible to make money out of content on the Internet. In my entire life, I have "supported" precisely two internet things; Left Business Observer and Counterpunch. Both times, I've done so by taking out a subscription for their associated newsletters. There's a very simple reason for this.

My girlfriend reads my credit card bills. And while I am a cyber-aware, e-enabled character, who is in many ways the apotheosis of the information age, aware of "netizens" and "online communities" and such (I'm even thinking of buying a wireless telephone!), the dear girlf is more of what they call a "sensible person", always concentrating on "how we pay the rent and feed the baby", and such Old Economy worries. If she were to see on my credit card bill that I had donated a sum of money to a website, she would think either:

That I had started donating money for something that others were offering me for free (ie, that I had gone out of my tiny mind), or

That it was in some way a pornographic site

Either of these would be likely to reduce her perception of my Darwinian fitness as a mate, and since I prefer sleeping in my house to sleeping with the winos, that would be a negative outcome for me.

Basically, the pornographers have poisoned the well for any other business model on the Internet. Any time anyone thinks of "paying for content", they think "pornography" and then they think "I don't want to pay for content". So, enjoy this weblog while its hosting providers still have the cash to maintain it; I'm buggered if I'm paying for it when the ballon goes up.